Vocabulary Building In a Book Club, Can Be Fun!

A new 'word' discovery took us on a jolly trip at the Young Readers' Club!

We are constantly looking for ways to have fun learning new words. This time around, one group virtually travelled to a school in the U.S that has hydroponic farming in its cafeteria, enabling students to get fresh and healthy greens in their lunches every day. What's more, they also saw teenagers helping around in growing plants using the hydroponic method. All that after of course learning what 'hydroponic' means and why it can make a difference. If that is starting to sound textbookish, well it did for us, so we decided to ramp it up a little. One group came up with clues to enable the other group to guess the word 'hydroponic' correctly using the clues. The clues started with cryptic riddles that were super difficult to decipher. Then one of the readers suggested simplifying it and in the process it went to the other extreme. The point is all the time we were working one single word, "hydroponic."

The process was repeated for another group but this time a different word, "permafrost". Readers added different pockets of info + questions to make the activity interesting for the other group to guess. We then virtually travelled to the northern hemisphere, tracking the countries that have permafrost that has lasted for centuries. We then imagined finding an ancient civilization beneath the permafrost and what that would like!

A half an hour of laughter, brainstorming and lots of collaborative work to learn and discover as much info as possible about these two words, "permafrost" and "hydroponic."

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The Young Readers' Club is a book club for the 8-12 age group. We also do vocabulary building activities and mini writing lessons for a little variety!

Writing programs for the 9-12 age group- Young Writers' Club Jr.  

The Young Writers' Club program for the 13-16 age group offers a weekly platform to read and discuss curated articles from the news, observe writing approaches and practise one's writing skills.

NEW! Tween Tribune  is an online magazine for the Young Writers' Club (Jr.) program for tweens. Weekly updates of our discussions are published. Once in 6 months, the best of writing by the tween members is made available to read.

 NEW! Musings from the Young Writers' Club is an online magazine showcasing the work we do at the Young Writers' Club.